“Unsubscribe”

This has almost certainly happened to you: you make a purchase from a non-Amazon web site, and sometimes even before your purchase arrives, but certainly after it has arrived, you’re deluged with emails from the company. Those emails say something to the effect of “We’re sending this to you because you subscribed” but of course you never subscribed. They take your purchase as an implicit subscription, or maybe it’s buried somewhere in the fine print, but before you know it you’re getting emails: maybe weekly, maybe two or three times a week, maybe even daily.

So you unsubscribe – which a few years ago wasn’t even a word – and when you do they’re polite about it, even though they may ask why you’ve chosen to forsake them, which of course is none of their business, but your action comes with an explanation/warning: that unsubscribing takes ten days to two weeks and in that time you may continue to receive emails.

And you wonder: how is it that they could take your money and get your merchandise to you in three or four days and start burying you with emails as soon as you hit the “purchase” button but it takes two weeks to delete your name from a mailing list?